Wednesday, February 25, 2015

I've been bogged down by both the
obligations of teaching as well as this tendon issue in my elbow, so
I haven't been writing reviews of late (that, and I've been
questioning why I'm even doing it). I do want to take a few moments, though, to point to a few books that I wanted to give some
positive press to.

Honey #1

(Celine Loup)

Honey #1 was not what I expected it to
be at all, and it's so much the better for that. It's an
anthropomorphic bee story, sort of, in which the honey bees all look
like cover models for Vogue in the 1920's and one or two of them
suffer from existential ennui. Like I said, it was not what I
expected (although, to be honest, I'm not really sure what my
expectations were).

Celine Loup does some amazing things
with her art in this book, most notably with her use of color to
accentuate mood and add dynamism to her pages. In terms of
storytelling, just when I thought the book might be teetering on
ham-fisted melodrama, Loup throws another curve into her narrative
which kept me eagerly turning pages a'plenty.

After reading Honey #1, I will never
look at butterflies in the same way again. Also, Loup has
exponentially added to my fear of wasps. Thanks for that.

When the cover of your book sports both
a nervous looking hot dog wearing sneakers and knee socks and it's
emblazoned with a “Mature Audiences ONLY!” admonition, you're
already playing the hype game at a top-shelf level. The problem with
this kind of hype, though, is it usually masks something unworthy of
that kind of sonorousness. NOT SO with Herman the Hot Dog #2.

Right out of the gate, Buck spares no
decorum or sensibilities with a story called “Jeers of a Clown”
that starts off as a story about trying to increase a television
station's ratings but then veers off into places that I just can't
even talk about – it's offensive, it's wrong on so many levels –
but it's tear-inducing funny. It's not often that I find myself
sitting alone in my house with a book in my hands and laughing so
loudly that I scare my dog. I mean, I seriously let loose a
thundering guffaw. When was the last time you let loose one of those?

Monday, February 16, 2015

Much
to my chagrin, a number of important voices in comics criticism have
started to move away from writing about comics. The reasons for this
move are many. In the case of some, they've taken on other positions
within the medium (working for publishers, creating their own comics,
etc...), in other cases they've been harassed by the internet for
having unpopular views (most recently Zainab Akhtar from the great
site Comics and Cola who is scaling back her posts), and in still
other cases, they've just hit burnout. I recently contacted three of
my favorite critics and writing partners who have all publicly stated
they are moving away from criticism or have begun to question its
worth, and I asked them to write a short piece on why they have come
to this point in their “careers”. My hope is that this
discussion may lead to something. What that something is, though, I
have no idea.

My
concern is that as more erudite and thoughtful critics leave comics,
what will become of comics themselves?

It
started when I put out the following e-mail to Taylor Lilly, Justin
Giampaoli, and Keith Silva:

“Gentlemen –

I'm
thinking about putting together a little writing piece called “When
Good Reviewers Burn Out” or “Writin' About Comics Blues” or
“When Love Ain't Enough” or “Fuck You, There's No Money In This
Shit” or something like that.

I
figure it this way – we're all kinda wondering what the hell we are
doing when we are doing this writing about comics thing. As you know,
I've been thinking about this a lot lately – not necessarily what
is the role of the critic (although I'm still working that shit out,
see my interview with Colin Smith), but why write about comics at
all.”

What
follows is their responses (followed by my own sense of things):

Taylor
Lilley (No Cape No Mask): Why write about comics at all? Why write at all?
Why do anything of soft value in a world where actions of hard value
are so desperately needed?

Don’t
worry, I’m not going to actually try to answer all those questions.
I too have looked at the header of an article, seen the double digit
read-time, and thought “Not today”.

Elkin,
you wrote the above italics in an email to a small group of people
who routinely invest their time, gratis, in considering the
work-for-money of people who make art for a living. Then, a couple
weeks later, you wrote this.
I’m not going to label it a review, or an article. It just is.

For
me, my answer to the italics is this: If I can’t be as emotionally
involved and as philosophically provoked by what I’m writing as
Elkin clearly was, and articulate it so effectively, well…
why shout mediocrities into an already echoing well?

Defeatist?
Extremist? Unrealistic?

At
the core of generating any kind of readership is consistency. Every
copy-and-pasted “How To” article you’ve ever superciliously
browsed will confirm that. So will Seth Godin, so Hyperions and
Satyrs both agree. And if we’re considering writing, we’re hoping
to be read. Unfortunately, I’m rarely engaged to the extent that I
feel my content deserves to be found. Rarely do I watch a film, read
a comic, binge on a show, and find at the end of it that I have
something to say about it so worthwhile, so insightful and otherwise
unavailable, that I MUST deliver it to the people.

But
if I don’t deliver something consistently, if I have no track
record of entries to prove my dedication and credibility, how will
anyone find these infrequent gems of mine? They won’t.

So
to have a shot at discovery, I have to create and publish content
that I don’t really believe deserves sharing, earning trust for
when I drop the good stuff. That sounds too much like my day job,
grinding through the shitty parts to get to the golden parts. Doing
that pays my bills, buys me this computer so I can afford to indulge
these navel-gazing quandaries of self-expression. But before the
screen, fixed in its glow…

I
just don’t care enough about being read to start grinding again.

Without
that effort, though, I don’t get to exchange with brilliant folks
like the other contributors to this piece. I don’t read as much of
what they produce, either, because I’m less interested in receiving
than in exchanging. So do we actually publish for the minds we’ll
meet, rather than the effects our content will have?

I
don’t know. I’m not publishing right now.

But
once I’m engaged, there are two questions: “Will anyone find
this?”, and “If nobody did, would their lives be worse for
missing out?”. Double-positives do not abound.

Monday, February 9, 2015

“I
had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very
different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and
power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was
changed. The ambition of the enquirer seemed to limit itself to the
annihilation of those vision on which my interest in science was
chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless
grandeur for realities of little worth.”
– Mary Shelly, Frankenstein

“For
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to
be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”
– Romans 8:18

Living
ain't easy sometimes. Misery, mourning, heartbreak, and suffering
continue to engulf the world despite our technological advances,
oftentimes because of them. The darkness of sorrow is the constant
shadow cast in the bright light of joy. It's thick. It blankets. It's
universal.

There's
this compulsion to utter some sort of statement like, “Ah, life...”
and weasel the self into the comfortable confines of the community of
despondency – that warm, liquid space we tend to float in when it
all gets too much, you know, to keep on keeping on. Because, yeah,
life can be fucking brutal sometimes.

Have
you been reading about the spate of abandoned children being found in
fecal smeared houses lately? Or those homeless people being doused in
gasoline and set aflame? Have you heard of the massacres in Nigeria?
Have you been following the waves of horror that passes itself off
nightly as news?

Fuck.
It's incredible what we do to each other. The pain that people bring
to the lives of others is seemingly unending.

Then,
of course, there's the pain we put upon ourselves, the sharpened
sticks we poke into our own eyes out of guilt or shame or some sad
dysmorphia. When you slam your head against the red brick walls, the
blood that gushes covers you completely. When you spend two years of
your life carefully planning on how to end it, your pain is whole, it
is who you are.

And
even though you keep turning your head, you always end up facing
something.

It's
pretty fucking amazing how many of us actually make it through.

Noah
Van Sciver's new book from Fantagraphics, Saint
Cole, has got me
thinking about my relationship with misery. It's also got me thinking
about the obligations of the artist to his or her art, and, maybe
more importantly, to the audience.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Acclaimed independent publisher Retrofit Comics is pleased to announce their official 2015 line of twelve comic books, graphic novels, an art book, and an anthology. Retrofit Comics also officially launches their 2015 subscription drive, with a discount for early subscribers.

Still trying to write about a truly awful comic.There has to be a way of discussing work that’s terrible without seeming to be point-scoring.

– Colin Smith

To which I responded by writing, “Why write about it at all? Why not just spend your time championing things you love?”

And thus began my initial conversation with Colin Smith, writer for Q Magazine, NewStatesman.com, Sequart, CBR (Comic Book Resources), FPI (Foreign Policy Initiative), and his recently shuttered blog, Too Busy Thinking About My Comics, about the role of modern comics criticism.

Daniel Elkin for Comics Bulletin: First off, thanks again for agreeing to talk more about the role of the critic, criticism in general, and Modern Comics Criticism (MCC) in particular. We covered a broad range of ideas in our tweeting back and forth, but there is only so much you can say limited by 140 characters.

Let’s begin here: Your initial response to my tweet pointing to the use of criticism to champion things you love was something along the lines of that this is “not the critical tradition (you) come from.” Before we go any further in this discussion, I think it would be helpful to clarify and define exactly what that critical tradition is.

Colin Smith: I immediately felt uncomfortable about my use of ‘tradition’ in that tweet. It had seemed appropriate in the by-necessity pithy context of Twitter, but it seems to suggest an authority that I hadn’t meant to lay claim to. A far better way of making the same point would’ve been to say that the critics I most enjoy and admire would never have considered an approach that was exclusively about ‘championing things (they) love’.

If you’ll forgive me, the only way to explain my point is to fall back onto autobiography, and I can well imagine that that would make this too self-involved and long-winded a response to be of interest or use to you. So please do feel comfortable in just calling a halt to these proceedings. I would entirely understand, I promise you!

I never had any ambition to be a critic of any sort. (I certainly don’t think of myself as one.) It wasn’t on my list of things to do. Yet no matter how incredibly minor a critic I am, and I think we can agree I’m an incredibly minor critic, I have ended up writing a considerable amount of criticism. It was all an accident. I had been unexpectedly and protractedly ill. I had to retire from work, I became unavoidably isolated from the world and my mind become more and more distractible and rusty. So simply to get my brain turning again, I started a blog, and while it could have been about anything from theatre to the singles chart to football, I settled almost by chance on comics. It’s a medium I love, of course, but it was also a subject that seemed to promise anonymity. Who was going to read my thoughts on comics? As a discipline, it helped focus my thinking and served to mark off one day from another, but I never imagined that even one or two people would stumble across the blog, or return again after they did.TooBusyThinking was never a major player – it never had more than a quarter million hits in any year – but it was never meant to be. Accidentally emerging into the peripheries of pop cultural debate, it took a while for me to realise that I’d given no prior thought at all to any critical tradition. But to have done so would have been absurd.

KEITH SILVA: First came lust (Luxuria), followed by gluttony (Gula) and after, avarice (Avaritia) and now negligence/sloth (Acedia), so much divinity, so much comedy and so much love for sin(s). What precedes each of these funny-sounding Latin-y words — which, for those keeping score at home (nerds), are, truth be told, derived from a medieval regional Italian dialect, Tuscany to be specific — is … more Italian: Casanova. As both title and titular figure, each swings. Casanova Quinn is James Bond by another name; a character one might describe as “what every man would like to be and what every woman would like between her sheets” if such a phrase didn’t sound so outdated or reek of fifties sexism, but I digress.

Before Matt Fraction became a one man cottage industry for creator-owned passion projects (Sex Criminals,Satellite Sam and Ody-C) there was (there is) Casanova. Published by Image Comics in 2006, Casanova: Luxuria is where Fraction first slipped the shackles of his Marvel masters and their assembly-line of corporate cape comics to plant his own flag; to his credit, he brought along three inimitable artists — cartoonist Gabriel Bá, colorist Cris Peter and letterer Dustin Harbin — to give his espionage, sci-fi, adventure mash-up a cool factor of a cagillion and a sexiness that makes the most (and least) chaste, wet. Luxuria remains a masterpiece of wit, imagination and storytelling so tight as to appear painted on. Few comics are as fun, pure and uncut as Casanova: Luxuria.

The second and third chapters, Gula and Avaritia, respectively, never quite catch the first-time giddiness of theirpaterfamilias predecessor. How could they? Avaritia comes closest to the joy (the Fraction-y-ness) of its antecedent, a contact high, at best. As for Gula, well, frankly, it’s a mess of over-thinking, over-indulgence and smacks of trying-too-hard, a crystalline example of a sophomore slump. And … so … Acedia? … well, magic-eight-ball-wise, let’s say, ‘signs point to sexiness.’

Sitting in with Fraction et al. for Acedia is literary colossus and inveterate comic book fanboy, Michael Chabon who gets to punch below his weight class with Moon’s twin brother and the co-creator of Casanova, Gabriel Bá. Chabon and Bá (along with Peter and Harbin) contribute a back-up story about flashes of full frontal nudity, the rare bird known as the ‘rock critic’ and the power of rock-and-roll. Chabon, who until this point, gave good blurb on Casanovais the perfect foil for Fraction’s hyper-focused frippery. Chabon gets to pen the story of a member of the fierce female foursome, T.A.M.I. She brags about her on-stage turnout as no more than “three strands of black wire, two LED flashers and a titanium kotex,” so, yeah, Chabon gets it. As for Fraction …